When Life Gives You Lemons, You Can Still End Up With Lyme

Here's the thing about life.  Having one crappy thing happen to you does not mean that other crappy things can't still happen to you.  It's not like your Crappy Quota has been met, and you can now coast through the rest of your life.  Nope.  That's just not how this whole thing works.

Stay with me.  Last Thursday, I started feeling really tired.  Just rundown.  Fried.  You know, normal mom stuff.  I went to bed at the embarrassingly lame hour of 8:30 pm that night and figured I'd feel better in the morning.

I didn't.  I felt worse.  In addition to being tired, now I had muscle soreness as well.  And headaches.  Also these weird hot flashes.  I honestly thought I was going through The Change about 10 years early.  But then the cold flashes started.  So I put that theory to bed along with myself.

The symptoms continued all weekend on and off.  I also added a low-grade fever and a loss of appetite to the mix. On Sunday morning, I noticed a weird rash.  I won't say exactly where the rash was, but let's assume that it wasn't in a place where I spend a lot of time gazing.  This is to say that I definitely hadn't noticed anything unusual happening there until the rash began to itch and skin became tender around it.  I decided to go to the doctor the following week as soon as possible.

Monday came, and Fionn had clinic.  Clinic went well.  Fionn's counts were up (920), but he still has a persistent cough which makes his docs nervous, especially with some travel coming up in our calendar.  So we are holding tight with his current medication regimen instead of upping it as was the original intention for this week.  Fionn's meds are still at only 66% of what he should be taking in this stage of treatment, but his docs have assured us that this is perfectly safe and not jeopardizing his remission in any way.  By the way, Fionn feels great right now.  He is full of energy and spunk and loving himself some summer so far.

Meanwhile, during our appointment, I was walking around the hospital with my arms crossed over my chest and just shaking like a leaf.  Don't get me wrong, there is nothing balmy about the hospital.  It's definitely a tad on the chilly side.  But nothing to justify this shuddering.  I called my doctor, and she was able to see me later that day.

Thank goodness.  She took one look at my rash combined with my symptoms and my account that I had seen 2 ticks on my inner thigh the week prior (but thought I had removed them quickly before they bit me) and declared, "Oh, honey, you have it."

By "it," of course, she meant Lyme Disease.  The good news is that I caught it quickly, so a complete cure and recovery was absolutely expected.  She prescribed the antibiotic doxycycline for 2.5 weeks and sent me on my way.  (Quick PSA: My doctor said that if you get bitten by a tick, you can IMMEDIATELY ask your doctor for this antibiotic and take it for 3 days to erase any potential of contracting Lyme.  She gave me some extras to have on hand in case I get bitten again.  Good to know).

Anyway, the rest of the day and Monday night were not fun.  My headaches got so much worse, and I also started to experience some weird out of body feelings where I felt like I was walking through a dream.  Not helpful when you are trying to bathe your two screaming children.

That night I also couldn't sleep because of the headaches and the hot flashes.  I came downstairs, opened up my computer, and started a "woe is me" blog post.  And I almost posted it.

Gosh, I'm so glad I didn't.

Here's why.  First of all, I felt better about 10 hours later.  Once the antibiotics started working their magic on my body, I started to feel like myself again.  By 2 pm yesterday, I was like a new woman.  I coasted through the Safeway freezer section without even a hint of the shivers.  That self-pitying blog post was a moment in time.  A really, really unhappy moment in time.  And that's totally valid.  I'm not trying to erase that difficult few days.  It sucked.  But it wasn't even a chapter in my life yet.  It was just a blip.  A blink.

And the tone of the post was all wrong too.  It read like a whiny diary entry.  And for what?  Some people suffer for weeks, months, years, even decades with Lyme Disease.  I have not yet earned my stripes to make such a fuss.  Hopefully, I never will.  But if I do, I hope I will do it with a little more grace than that blog post.  Trust me.  It was pathetic.

And mostly there is this.  It just becomes really hard to feel too sorry for yourself for having a totally treatable condition when you open up your Facebook account the following day and read that a little baby girl who has cancer is now entering hospice because her cancer has progressed to a point of no return.  She's Deaglan's age, folks.

It's just...everything pales.  Right?  Everything pales.

No one ever said life would be easy.  But someone is always walking a harder road.